SEEKING BETTER VS. SEEKING TO LIVE

For a long time now, I’ve been swimming around in a sea of ideas so vast in pursuit of a goal that I have only been able to describe in a similarly broad manner.

It’s a simple and perhaps the most difficult of goals - to live better.

It’s this pursuit that drives the musings that I write here as part of The Comma Project.

Some of the themes I’ve been most interested in feel frustratingly meta and philosophical at times:

Seeking what’s true, both about who we are at our core and the world around us

Becoming our truest and fullest selves, evolving through what holds us back along the way

Connecting with others walking the same path

Doing work worth doing in service of a change we seek to make in the world

Living creatively, making art that’s authentic and expressive of who we are and the stories we live every day

Most of the time, the frustration is irritatingly uncomfy.

But every once in a while, the frustration bears its gifts, and brings an invitation and a willingness to try on a different perspective for size.

A different perspective, and a bigger picture

Life is complex and multidimensional. When I’m stumped, I often find that it’s because I’m missing the bigger picture - like I’ve zoomed in too far, focusing on specific pieces of a puzzle while losing sight of how they fit into the overall picture they create.

Looking back at some of these thematic puzzle pieces that I listed above, I’m struck that they seem to suggest some sense of precision - as if this pursuit of living better can be boiled down to an exacting, clear-cut equation. As if there’s a possibility of solving each component, through which I get closer to this better life I desire.

I’ve been trying out this paradigm for a long time now, seeing if life might in fact function like a math problem, where I’d just feel better if only I could inch towards some tidy solution to a currently unidentified master equation of life.

Has it worked?

I think it has, to some extent.

Look, it seems to me that making an effort to improve even a part of life is better than aimlessly wandering through it.

But I sense that I’ve reached the limit of this worldview - where I’m met more often with frustration than freedom.

I think one major reason is that it hurls the possibility of peace, freedom, and contentment into the future.

I sense that in my pursuit of living better, I’ve been focusing on the wrong word.

Doing to being

Why does the emphasis on the right word matter?

Let’s think about it this way. If seeking to live better means better than today, then today is insufficient, suggesting that some future could hold what I desire. This perspective carries an ambient sense of not-enoughness.

In other words, it means that today, and the me who is living in it, is frozen in a shame state, where my current version of self is not good enough as is. That bodes poorly for the sense of peace, freedom, and contentment I seek.

If, on the other hand, seeking to live better means switching the emphasis from desiring to feel better to seeking to live more deeply, the present experience of life itself goes from a mere stepping stone to the destination itself.

It brings life as is front and center, freeing the concept of an insufficient present moment from its enslavement to a theoretically ideal future. After all, the present moment is the only one where we can in fact experience anything.

This shift in perspective also moves the focus of this theoretical equation of life from its components to their common purpose - the life that they add up to. (Or, in our puzzle analogy, from the puzzle pieces to the overall picture.)

From what I do and where I can improve to who I am.

From Human Doing to Human Being.

With this shift, what matters is no longer analyzing and defining how I might become better, but rather fully expressing who I am at my core, where all these experiences, questions, and desires - all of life itself - originate from.

Still a process. Just a different one

Now, wouldn’t this focus on living and being instead of better and doing absolve us and allow for passive stagnancy?

I’d venture to say no.

To the contrary, I’d venture to say that it invites a process and pursuit of a different kind, and perhaps an even more difficult one.

It invites a pursuit of truth and authenticity.

It nudges us to turn inward and explore who we truly are at our core.

It demands courage.

It takes courage because truly going inward requires that we face those parts of us that aren’t so pretty. We are human after all.

This shift no longer allows us to jettison those imperfect parts.

It no longer allows us to hold on to the idea that those parts may not be destined for us after all. It asks us to drop the idea that our imperfections are to be shed during our pursuit of some future ideal state of better that we are destined to achieve, if only we keep trying.

It demands that we embrace an even more challenging pursuit than improvement: becoming.

Becoming more of who we are - more truthful, authentic, and whole, imperfections and all.

It also nudges us a step further - to not just discover who we are inside, but to also live that way as we walk in the outside world. To live from the inside-out.

To live better, we must show up in the world with integrity, harmonious with the truth of the whole of who we are. We must be authentic, inclusive of the parts that even we wish were different.

So, no. I don’t think this is a more passive existence.

It still demands a process and a pursuit.

It still demands evolution.

The same puzzle

I still think the puzzle matters.

I still think it matters because I still believe the pursuit of living better matters.

I just think it’s more about the finished picture than the puzzle pieces themselves, just like it’s more about living better, not living better.

So, I’ll continue to seek to understand the specific pieces of the puzzle - the components of life - I’ll just seek to do it with more of an eye to the completed picture they reveal.

Until next time,
Devin